O:9:"MagpieRSS":19:{s:6:"parser";i:0;s:12:"current_item";a:0:{}s:5:"items";a:20:{i:0;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:26:"Help us by helping others!";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/oDN7x_pPQ7o/";s:8:"comments";s:52:"http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 02 Jul 2013 09:29:13 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:26:"WordPressWordPress Plugins";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=93309";s:11:"description";s:771:"<p>The WordPress.org forums for our WordPress SEO plugin are rather busy. Unfortunately, there&#8217;s no way for us to keep up with all the questions there as we have millions of users, which leads to a few hundred questions each month. So we need your help! Loads of the questions there are rather simple, others are&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/">Help us by helping others!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:3608:"<p>The WordPress.org <a href="http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo">forums for our WordPress SEO plugin</a> are rather busy. Unfortunately, there&#8217;s no way for us to keep up with all the questions there as we have millions of users, which leads to a few hundred questions each month. So we need your help!</p>
<p>Loads of the questions there are rather simple, others are harder and require going back and forth a few times. Some are just plain bugs, but hard to reproduce. All of them together cost more time than we can spend on it and keep the plugin free at the same time. I&#8217;m saying officially now what&#8217;s been the case for quite a while already: <em>we don&#8217;t do support on the WordPress.org forums</em>. It&#8217;s easier to just state it like that than to hop in every once in a while and get people&#8217;s hopes up when we might not have much time for a while after.</p>
<p>Which is why I&#8217;m writing this: I&#8217;m asking all of you to be involved there, to help us help others. If you could answer just 1 question there each month, we&#8217;d already appreciate your help. If you can find bugs that people report, reproduce them and turn them into <a href="https://github.com/jdevalk/wordpress-seo/issues">Github issues</a> that are easy to reproduce for us, we&#8217;d be even more appreciative.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll be looking at the forums regularly to see what&#8217;s happening, to check if no big issue is suddenly popping up. If we see you in there giving truly outstanding support to our users, we will reward that as much as we can.</p>
<h2>Premium Support</h2>
<p>For those of you who dislike forums and want to be supported by me and the rest of the Yoast team, don&#8217;t fret. Starting in August, we&#8217;ll start offering a premium version of the plugin, including support (as in, you&#8217;ll get a direct email address and we&#8217;ll reply to your questions as soon as we can), at a yearly fee, starting from $89 for a single site to $349 for unlimited sites. That&#8217;s $29 a month for support on unlimited sites and just $7.50 for a single site. And of course we won&#8217;t remove the download from WordPress.org and we won&#8217;t disable the free forums, so you don&#8217;t have to pay us anything if you don&#8217;t want to.</p>
<p>The plugin will have some other functionality that&#8217;s not included in the SEO plugin (what? that&#8217;s still a secret ;) ) and we&#8217;ll use those users as a &#8220;testbed&#8221;, if they want to, for new features.</p>
<h2>Google Analytics for WordPress</h2>
<p>Exciting work is happening around our Google Analytics plugin too, it&#8217;ll soon move to Github properly as well so that people will be able to contribute more easily. It too has forums that we can&#8217;t spend time on, so if you want to dive in there, please, please do!</p>
<p>In all, I hope this change in our support policy for our free plugins makes it a bit more clear where we&#8217;re headed and what we&#8217;re doing and not doing. I&#8217;d love to hear your thoughts below!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/">Help us by helping others!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/oDN7x_pPQ7o" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:48:"http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"18";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:112:"http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=help-us-by-helping-others";}s:7:"summary";s:771:"<p>The WordPress.org forums for our WordPress SEO plugin are rather busy. Unfortunately, there&#8217;s no way for us to keep up with all the questions there as we have millions of users, which leads to a few hundred questions each month. So we need your help! Loads of the questions there are rather simple, others are&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/">Help us by helping others!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:3608:"<p>The WordPress.org <a href="http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo">forums for our WordPress SEO plugin</a> are rather busy. Unfortunately, there&#8217;s no way for us to keep up with all the questions there as we have millions of users, which leads to a few hundred questions each month. So we need your help!</p>
<p>Loads of the questions there are rather simple, others are harder and require going back and forth a few times. Some are just plain bugs, but hard to reproduce. All of them together cost more time than we can spend on it and keep the plugin free at the same time. I&#8217;m saying officially now what&#8217;s been the case for quite a while already: <em>we don&#8217;t do support on the WordPress.org forums</em>. It&#8217;s easier to just state it like that than to hop in every once in a while and get people&#8217;s hopes up when we might not have much time for a while after.</p>
<p>Which is why I&#8217;m writing this: I&#8217;m asking all of you to be involved there, to help us help others. If you could answer just 1 question there each month, we&#8217;d already appreciate your help. If you can find bugs that people report, reproduce them and turn them into <a href="https://github.com/jdevalk/wordpress-seo/issues">Github issues</a> that are easy to reproduce for us, we&#8217;d be even more appreciative.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll be looking at the forums regularly to see what&#8217;s happening, to check if no big issue is suddenly popping up. If we see you in there giving truly outstanding support to our users, we will reward that as much as we can.</p>
<h2>Premium Support</h2>
<p>For those of you who dislike forums and want to be supported by me and the rest of the Yoast team, don&#8217;t fret. Starting in August, we&#8217;ll start offering a premium version of the plugin, including support (as in, you&#8217;ll get a direct email address and we&#8217;ll reply to your questions as soon as we can), at a yearly fee, starting from $89 for a single site to $349 for unlimited sites. That&#8217;s $29 a month for support on unlimited sites and just $7.50 for a single site. And of course we won&#8217;t remove the download from WordPress.org and we won&#8217;t disable the free forums, so you don&#8217;t have to pay us anything if you don&#8217;t want to.</p>
<p>The plugin will have some other functionality that&#8217;s not included in the SEO plugin (what? that&#8217;s still a secret ;) ) and we&#8217;ll use those users as a &#8220;testbed&#8221;, if they want to, for new features.</p>
<h2>Google Analytics for WordPress</h2>
<p>Exciting work is happening around our Google Analytics plugin too, it&#8217;ll soon move to Github properly as well so that people will be able to contribute more easily. It too has forums that we can&#8217;t spend time on, so if you want to dive in there, please, please do!</p>
<p>In all, I hope this change in our support policy for our free plugins makes it a bit more clear where we&#8217;re headed and what we&#8217;re doing and not doing. I&#8217;d love to hear your thoughts below!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/help-us-by-helping-others/">Help us by helping others!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/oDN7x_pPQ7o" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:1;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:53:"Social Media Optimization with WordPress SEO by Yoast";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/ddq3zyZ60YM/";s:8:"comments";s:80:"http://yoast.com/social-media-optimization-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 25 Jun 2013 13:56:02 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:42:"Social MediaWordPress PluginsWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=92102";s:11:"description";s:838:"<p>Our WordPress SEO plugin handles optimization of your WordPress site for search engines and we dare say it does a very good job of it. Most of that is technical optimization, like our XML sitemap functionality and aids in content optimization, like your page analysis function. But there&#8217;s more to SEO than that. You need&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/social-media-optimization-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/">Social Media Optimization with WordPress SEO by Yoast</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:26:"Array
			
		
			
		
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:76:"http://yoast.com/social-media-optimization-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"42";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:12:"
			
			
			";s:13:"content_title";s:75:"video-embed-facebookTwitter Cardconversion rate optimization search results";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:168:"http://yoast.com/social-media-optimization-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=social-media-optimization-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast";}s:7:"summary";s:838:"<p>Our WordPress SEO plugin handles optimization of your WordPress site for search engines and we dare say it does a very good job of it. Most of that is technical optimization, like our XML sitemap functionality and aids in content optimization, like your page analysis function. But there&#8217;s more to SEO than that. You need&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/social-media-optimization-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/">Social Media Optimization with WordPress SEO by Yoast</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:2;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:43:"Mea Culpa on a bad update + lessons learned";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/y5KyAH1_II0/";s:8:"comments";s:68:"http://yoast.com/mea-culpa-on-a-bad-update-lessons-learned/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 21 Jun 2013 08:04:17 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:9:"WordPress";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=91686";s:11:"description";s:791:"<p>Last night I pushed out an update to our WordPress SEO plugin, version 1.4.8. It included a ton of changes including support for the new author stuff Facebook announced yesterday. We had been testing all the other changes in that release for a while already and all seemed fine, so I was baffled when I&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/mea-culpa-on-a-bad-update-lessons-learned/">Mea Culpa on a bad update + lessons learned</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:64:"http://yoast.com/mea-culpa-on-a-bad-update-lessons-learned/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"85";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:22:"WordPress PHP versions";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:144:"http://yoast.com/mea-culpa-on-a-bad-update-lessons-learned/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mea-culpa-on-a-bad-update-lessons-learned";}s:7:"summary";s:791:"<p>Last night I pushed out an update to our WordPress SEO plugin, version 1.4.8. It included a ton of changes including support for the new author stuff Facebook announced yesterday. We had been testing all the other changes in that release for a while already and all seemed fine, so I was baffled when I&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/mea-culpa-on-a-bad-update-lessons-learned/">Mea Culpa on a bad update + lessons learned</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:3;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:35:"Standardising WordPress theme hooks";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/PnrTguOMVZ8/";s:8:"comments";s:57:"http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 20 Jun 2013 13:55:03 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:42:"WordPressGenesisSchema.orgWordPress Themes";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=91530";s:11:"description";s:794:"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on integrating our SEO plugins more deeply with Genesis the last few weeks and something dawned on me. Ever since I wrote my post on Genesis 2.0, I&#8217;ve been thinking: Genesis started a small revolution, but we should open that up. More theme developers should start doing a Schema.org API and if&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/">Standardising WordPress theme hooks</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:4439:"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on integrating our SEO plugins more deeply with Genesis the last few weeks and something dawned on me. Ever since I wrote <a href="http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/">my post on Genesis 2.0</a>, I&#8217;ve been thinking: Genesis started a small revolution, but we should open that up. More theme developers should start doing a Schema.org API and if they do, we should make sure they&#8217;re interoperable.</p>
<p>In short: Genesis 2.0 added a Schema.org API, with hooks like:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="line-height: 13px;">genesis_attr_entry<br />
</span></li>
<li>genesis_attr_entry-title</li>
<li>genesis_attr_entry-content</li>
</ul>
<p>These hooks are very consistently named, which is very important. There&#8217;s one &#8220;issue&#8221; though: they&#8217;re namespaced. They all start with &#8220;genesis_&#8221;, which is a good practice by the Genesis community and one most theme authors use. But let&#8217;s think about this from a plugin authors perspective: if I add support for Genesis Schema.org API and say WooThemes decides to adopt it as well but prefixes it with &#8220;woo_&#8221;. And then 10 other theme vendors do the same thing. Instead of having one line of code that filters a specific hook&#8217;s output, I have 10 add_filter lines to add, and I need to do that for <em>every</em> change.</p>
<p>The same is true with some other hooks that loads of us plugin developers need but WordPress core refuses to add. I&#8217;ve had <a href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12563">lengthy discussions</a> about the need for a body_open hook in core, but the core team has all sorts of reasons not to want that. I see why, but that doesn&#8217;t stop us, as the WordPress community, with coming up with our own standards for hooks and standardizing them in a proper fashion.</p>
<h2>WordPress theme hook standardisation board</h2>
<p>I think we should be able to get the big theme guys together and come up with a proper standard for these things and it wouldn&#8217;t even need much work. Because genesis naming is so elegant, everyone could copy their schema.org API and prefix it with their own standard prefix. The only thing we have to decide on together is a constant we define for the theme prefix.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d say WP_THEME_NAMESPACE would be good. What that would allow is for Genesis to define that constant as &#8220;genesis&#8221;, and for me as a plugin author to hook into that:</p>
<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">add_filter( WP_THEME_NAMESPACE . '_attr_entry', 'yoast_filter_function' );</pre>
<p>This would then work with every theme that has support for that API and has defined the theme&#8217;s namespace. For other hooks it might be a bit more work, what I&#8217;d call &#8220;body_open&#8221; is in Genesis as &#8220;genesis_before&#8221;, which is semantically a bit weird in my opinion, but we should discuss.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d love to come up with a proper standard for these things. Which is why I&#8217;m calling for the formation of a WordPress theme hook standardisation &#8221;board&#8221;. I&#8217;d love to standardise hooks that all big themes have in such a way that plugins can start to rely on them. We shouldn&#8217;t &#8220;rely&#8221; on the core team to do this, in my opinion. I&#8217;d love to get StudioPress, WooThemes and all of the other theme people on board and do this together. If you represent a theme company and would like to join, jump in in the comments and I&#8217;ll contact those of you who &#8220;register&#8221; their support to come up with a proper way of discussing this.</p>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> of course 10 seconds after publication @nacin tells me something like this already exists in part: the <a href="https://github.com/zamoose/themehookalliance">Theme Hook Alliance</a>. We should probably all work together :)</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/">Standardising WordPress theme hooks</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/PnrTguOMVZ8" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:53:"http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"14";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:122:"http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=standard-wordpress-theme-hooks";}s:7:"summary";s:794:"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on integrating our SEO plugins more deeply with Genesis the last few weeks and something dawned on me. Ever since I wrote my post on Genesis 2.0, I&#8217;ve been thinking: Genesis started a small revolution, but we should open that up. More theme developers should start doing a Schema.org API and if&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/">Standardising WordPress theme hooks</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:4439:"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on integrating our SEO plugins more deeply with Genesis the last few weeks and something dawned on me. Ever since I wrote <a href="http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/">my post on Genesis 2.0</a>, I&#8217;ve been thinking: Genesis started a small revolution, but we should open that up. More theme developers should start doing a Schema.org API and if they do, we should make sure they&#8217;re interoperable.</p>
<p>In short: Genesis 2.0 added a Schema.org API, with hooks like:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="line-height: 13px;">genesis_attr_entry<br />
</span></li>
<li>genesis_attr_entry-title</li>
<li>genesis_attr_entry-content</li>
</ul>
<p>These hooks are very consistently named, which is very important. There&#8217;s one &#8220;issue&#8221; though: they&#8217;re namespaced. They all start with &#8220;genesis_&#8221;, which is a good practice by the Genesis community and one most theme authors use. But let&#8217;s think about this from a plugin authors perspective: if I add support for Genesis Schema.org API and say WooThemes decides to adopt it as well but prefixes it with &#8220;woo_&#8221;. And then 10 other theme vendors do the same thing. Instead of having one line of code that filters a specific hook&#8217;s output, I have 10 add_filter lines to add, and I need to do that for <em>every</em> change.</p>
<p>The same is true with some other hooks that loads of us plugin developers need but WordPress core refuses to add. I&#8217;ve had <a href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12563">lengthy discussions</a> about the need for a body_open hook in core, but the core team has all sorts of reasons not to want that. I see why, but that doesn&#8217;t stop us, as the WordPress community, with coming up with our own standards for hooks and standardizing them in a proper fashion.</p>
<h2>WordPress theme hook standardisation board</h2>
<p>I think we should be able to get the big theme guys together and come up with a proper standard for these things and it wouldn&#8217;t even need much work. Because genesis naming is so elegant, everyone could copy their schema.org API and prefix it with their own standard prefix. The only thing we have to decide on together is a constant we define for the theme prefix.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d say WP_THEME_NAMESPACE would be good. What that would allow is for Genesis to define that constant as &#8220;genesis&#8221;, and for me as a plugin author to hook into that:</p>
<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">add_filter( WP_THEME_NAMESPACE . '_attr_entry', 'yoast_filter_function' );</pre>
<p>This would then work with every theme that has support for that API and has defined the theme&#8217;s namespace. For other hooks it might be a bit more work, what I&#8217;d call &#8220;body_open&#8221; is in Genesis as &#8220;genesis_before&#8221;, which is semantically a bit weird in my opinion, but we should discuss.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d love to come up with a proper standard for these things. Which is why I&#8217;m calling for the formation of a WordPress theme hook standardisation &#8221;board&#8221;. I&#8217;d love to standardise hooks that all big themes have in such a way that plugins can start to rely on them. We shouldn&#8217;t &#8220;rely&#8221; on the core team to do this, in my opinion. I&#8217;d love to get StudioPress, WooThemes and all of the other theme people on board and do this together. If you represent a theme company and would like to join, jump in in the comments and I&#8217;ll contact those of you who &#8220;register&#8221; their support to come up with a proper way of discussing this.</p>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> of course 10 seconds after publication @nacin tells me something like this already exists in part: the <a href="https://github.com/zamoose/themehookalliance">Theme Hook Alliance</a>. We should probably all work together :)</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/standard-wordpress-theme-hooks/">Standardising WordPress theme hooks</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/PnrTguOMVZ8" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:4;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:58:"Conversion rate optimization: hypothesise first, then test";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/XNxROD0aRE4/";s:8:"comments";s:72:"http://yoast.com/conversion-rate-optimization-hypothesise-test/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:38:28 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Thijs de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:22:"Usability & Conversion";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=90591";s:11:"description";s:822:"<p>Since I began working at Yoast, I’ve been busy with a lot of things, but my personal favorite definitely is this one: conversion. Maybe this is because of my background in behavioural science. Or maybe I just prefer bigger numbers to smaller ones. In any case, the fact remains: I’m hooked. Now, for the people&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/conversion-rate-optimization-hypothesise-test/">Conversion rate optimization: hypothesise first, then test</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/thijs/">Thijs de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:8:"Array
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:68:"http://yoast.com/conversion-rate-optimization-hypothesise-test/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"23";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:51:"Conversion Optimization - Organic traffic Yoast.com";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:152:"http://yoast.com/conversion-rate-optimization-hypothesise-test/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=conversion-rate-optimization-hypothesise-test";}s:7:"summary";s:822:"<p>Since I began working at Yoast, I’ve been busy with a lot of things, but my personal favorite definitely is this one: conversion. Maybe this is because of my background in behavioural science. Or maybe I just prefer bigger numbers to smaller ones. In any case, the fact remains: I’m hooked. Now, for the people&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/conversion-rate-optimization-hypothesise-test/">Conversion rate optimization: hypothesise first, then test</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/thijs/">Thijs de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:5;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:48:"You can’t content-market your way through life";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/3oTBegZ_qrU/";s:8:"comments";s:54:"http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 30 May 2013 19:32:52 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:12:"Social Media";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=88660";s:11:"description";s:782:"<p>About a week ago, Olivier Blanchard, one of the few people who pride themselves on working in social media whose posts I actually enjoy reading, wrote a post on his blog. Now you might think that&#8217;s not very news worthy, but it was his first post since February 25th. Up until that time he had&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/">You can&#8217;t content-market your way through life</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:5156:"<p>About a week ago, <a href="http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/">Olivier Blanchard</a>, one of the few people who pride themselves on working in social media whose posts I actually enjoy reading, <a href="http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/back-by-popular-demand-less-filler-more-meat/">wrote a post on his blog</a>. Now you might think that&#8217;s not very news worthy, but it was his first post since February 25th. Up until that time he had been a very regular blogger, consistently writing posts with the occasional brilliant one between them. And that&#8217;s where the problem lay, as he discloses in his post:</p>
<blockquote><p>Truth is, sometimes, even someone as outspoken as me just doesn’t have anything really all that pertinent to write about on a blog like this one, and though the discipline to carry on writing “content” day after day anyway is admirable in many ways, I found the exercise pretty much mired in futility.</p></blockquote>
<p>I know how that feels. I write tutorial type posts all the time, as I do a lot of actual WordPress work and have inspiration for them, but I don&#8217;t write about SEO as often as I used to. The reason is simple: I&#8217;d be writing &#8220;content&#8221;. I&#8217;d be writing for the sake of writing. I&#8217;d be writing because I have loads of readers that want to read and it makes me feel good. To quote Olivier once more, because it&#8217;s too good of a quote to not repeat a 1000 times:</p>
<blockquote><p>You want to feel important, go do something important, something that actually matters &#8230;.. Do <em>something</em>. But for fuck’s sake, stop filling empty space with “content.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I like the idea of content marketing (though I hate the term <em>almost</em> as much as I hate the term &#8220;inbound marketing&#8221;, but that&#8217;s another story). But that type of marketing only works when you have an <em>actual</em> story to tell. Not made up bullshit. A real story with real life experiences and insights. To have those real life experiences, you have to do <em>work</em>. No-one can just &#8220;content market&#8221; his way through life.</p>
<p>So, before you start blogging about SEO, <em>do</em> some real SEO first. Make sure you <em>know</em> what you&#8217;re writing about. It&#8217;d really help a lot if people in SEO (and basically every other aspect of online marketing) would <em></em>practice <em>before</em> they preached. About 95% of the blog posts I see now copy ideas from 5 other sites and call it content. Or they&#8217;ll ask 5 UK SEO&#8217;s for an opinion about X, because they&#8217;re too bloody lazy and/or ignorant to do any real research themselves and call it &#8220;Practical Tips for Modern SEO From the Best Minds in Europe&#8221;<a href="http://blog.hubspot.com/seo-experts-from-europe-tips"></a>. I hate this new &#8220;one question interview&#8221; type of post. Do some fucking work and add some beef, or do a <em>real</em> interview (and learn to separate a country from a continent).</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the real challenge of content marketing: to tell a story about you or your product that resonates with me, provides me with value <em>and</em> makes me want to become your customer. To be able to tell that story, you or your product should have solved more than a few people&#8217;s problems first. You can content market all day long, when the product you sell is shit, it won&#8217;t help you much will it? You have to <em>work on that product</em>.</p>
<p>In SEO, the real experts are the people who can honestly say: this worked, that didn&#8217;t. Matt said X, but Y was the truth. I tried this, and burned a site, I tried that and the site dropped. Now I&#8217;m not saying you should burn your clients sites, but I <em>am</em> saying, instead of writing 5 or 10 crappy blog posts, do some research for yourself, write some code. Try something new, and then write a <em>real</em> good blog post. In fact, I&#8217;d rather read about 10 of your failings then about that one &#8220;success&#8221;.</p>
<p>Olivier probably ran into this issue. You can&#8217;t keep hitting repeat and rewrite that same story all the time without getting burned out. You have to do real work and then, when all is well, every once in a while you&#8217;ll have inspiration for a really good post, you&#8217;ll have a new idea.</p>
<p>If you do have that new idea, write that post and please do <a href="http://twitter.com/yoast">share it with me on Twitter</a>, but, please, spare me your &#8220;content&#8221;.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/">You can&#8217;t content-market your way through life</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/3oTBegZ_qrU" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:50:"http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"56";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:116:"http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=challenge-content-marketing";}s:7:"summary";s:782:"<p>About a week ago, Olivier Blanchard, one of the few people who pride themselves on working in social media whose posts I actually enjoy reading, wrote a post on his blog. Now you might think that&#8217;s not very news worthy, but it was his first post since February 25th. Up until that time he had&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/">You can&#8217;t content-market your way through life</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:5156:"<p>About a week ago, <a href="http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/">Olivier Blanchard</a>, one of the few people who pride themselves on working in social media whose posts I actually enjoy reading, <a href="http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/back-by-popular-demand-less-filler-more-meat/">wrote a post on his blog</a>. Now you might think that&#8217;s not very news worthy, but it was his first post since February 25th. Up until that time he had been a very regular blogger, consistently writing posts with the occasional brilliant one between them. And that&#8217;s where the problem lay, as he discloses in his post:</p>
<blockquote><p>Truth is, sometimes, even someone as outspoken as me just doesn’t have anything really all that pertinent to write about on a blog like this one, and though the discipline to carry on writing “content” day after day anyway is admirable in many ways, I found the exercise pretty much mired in futility.</p></blockquote>
<p>I know how that feels. I write tutorial type posts all the time, as I do a lot of actual WordPress work and have inspiration for them, but I don&#8217;t write about SEO as often as I used to. The reason is simple: I&#8217;d be writing &#8220;content&#8221;. I&#8217;d be writing for the sake of writing. I&#8217;d be writing because I have loads of readers that want to read and it makes me feel good. To quote Olivier once more, because it&#8217;s too good of a quote to not repeat a 1000 times:</p>
<blockquote><p>You want to feel important, go do something important, something that actually matters &#8230;.. Do <em>something</em>. But for fuck’s sake, stop filling empty space with “content.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I like the idea of content marketing (though I hate the term <em>almost</em> as much as I hate the term &#8220;inbound marketing&#8221;, but that&#8217;s another story). But that type of marketing only works when you have an <em>actual</em> story to tell. Not made up bullshit. A real story with real life experiences and insights. To have those real life experiences, you have to do <em>work</em>. No-one can just &#8220;content market&#8221; his way through life.</p>
<p>So, before you start blogging about SEO, <em>do</em> some real SEO first. Make sure you <em>know</em> what you&#8217;re writing about. It&#8217;d really help a lot if people in SEO (and basically every other aspect of online marketing) would <em></em>practice <em>before</em> they preached. About 95% of the blog posts I see now copy ideas from 5 other sites and call it content. Or they&#8217;ll ask 5 UK SEO&#8217;s for an opinion about X, because they&#8217;re too bloody lazy and/or ignorant to do any real research themselves and call it &#8220;Practical Tips for Modern SEO From the Best Minds in Europe&#8221;<a href="http://blog.hubspot.com/seo-experts-from-europe-tips"></a>. I hate this new &#8220;one question interview&#8221; type of post. Do some fucking work and add some beef, or do a <em>real</em> interview (and learn to separate a country from a continent).</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the real challenge of content marketing: to tell a story about you or your product that resonates with me, provides me with value <em>and</em> makes me want to become your customer. To be able to tell that story, you or your product should have solved more than a few people&#8217;s problems first. You can content market all day long, when the product you sell is shit, it won&#8217;t help you much will it? You have to <em>work on that product</em>.</p>
<p>In SEO, the real experts are the people who can honestly say: this worked, that didn&#8217;t. Matt said X, but Y was the truth. I tried this, and burned a site, I tried that and the site dropped. Now I&#8217;m not saying you should burn your clients sites, but I <em>am</em> saying, instead of writing 5 or 10 crappy blog posts, do some research for yourself, write some code. Try something new, and then write a <em>real</em> good blog post. In fact, I&#8217;d rather read about 10 of your failings then about that one &#8220;success&#8221;.</p>
<p>Olivier probably ran into this issue. You can&#8217;t keep hitting repeat and rewrite that same story all the time without getting burned out. You have to do real work and then, when all is well, every once in a while you&#8217;ll have inspiration for a really good post, you&#8217;ll have a new idea.</p>
<p>If you do have that new idea, write that post and please do <a href="http://twitter.com/yoast">share it with me on Twitter</a>, but, please, spare me your &#8220;content&#8221;.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/challenge-content-marketing/">You can&#8217;t content-market your way through life</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/3oTBegZ_qrU" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:6;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:24:"Schema.org & Genesis 2.0";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/qjdrBHKSCHM/";s:8:"comments";s:49:"http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 28 May 2013 20:30:13 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:42:"WordPressGenesisSchema.orgWordPress Themes";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=88276";s:11:"description";s:771:"<p>About a week ago, we &#8220;migrated&#8221; Yoast.com to Genesis 2.0, in the process we switched to their new HTML5 / Schema.org code and we slightly updated our design, making the header shorter and making improvements to our responsive design. This was a bit of work, but not even half as much as that sounds like&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/">Schema.org &#038; Genesis 2.0</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:45:"http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"37";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:49:"Speaking Page &#8211; Showing event schema markup";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:106:"http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=schema-org-genesis-2-0";}s:7:"summary";s:771:"<p>About a week ago, we &#8220;migrated&#8221; Yoast.com to Genesis 2.0, in the process we switched to their new HTML5 / Schema.org code and we slightly updated our design, making the header shorter and making improvements to our responsive design. This was a bit of work, but not even half as much as that sounds like&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/schema-org-genesis-2-0/">Schema.org &#038; Genesis 2.0</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:7;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:33:"How to cloak your affiliate links";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/tGiFxNVwZhw/";s:8:"comments";s:48:"http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 21 May 2013 20:43:05 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:22:"SEOAffiliate Marketing";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=87345";s:11:"description";s:800:"<p>We regularly review sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. I&#8217;ve always said and will continue to say that affiliate links should be redirected through a redirect script, but when we tried to help a client by linking to a proper explanation and example script, we couldn&#8217;t find one. So, in true Yoast style, I wrote&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/">How to cloak your affiliate links</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:6146:"<p>We regularly <a href="https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/">review sites</a> that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. I&#8217;ve always said and will continue to say that affiliate links should be redirected through a redirect script, but when we tried to help a client by linking to a proper explanation and example script, we couldn&#8217;t find one. So, in true Yoast style, I wrote a script and decided to write this article that outlines exactly how and why to use it.</p>
<h2>Why should I cloak my affiliate links?</h2>
<p>If you search online for it, there are tons of reasons for people to redirect their affiliate links. The &#8220;historical&#8221; reason for cloaking affiliate links is hiding that you&#8217;re an affiliate for the search engines. Now I&#8217;m not one to think the search engines are stupid enough to be fooled by an easy script like the one I&#8217;m providing below, but there are more reasons. The funny thing is that it&#8217;s called cloaking affiliate links because of that history, but I digress. Let me give you the three reasons why I do it and why I think every affiliate should be cloaking their affiliate links:</p>
<ol>
<li><span style="line-height: 13px;"><strong>Ease of management</strong><br />
You sometimes have to change your affiliate links. If you have to change them in more than one place, it&#8217;s bound to be a painful exercise, so you want to centralize management.</span></li>
<li><strong>Prevent leaking PageRank to advertisers</strong><br />
While sometimes you might want to &#8220;hide&#8221; for a search engine that you&#8217;re an affiliate, for  me the reasoning is actually the other way around. Affiliate links are ads, and those <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569">should be nofollowed</a> or otherwise prevented from leaking PageRank to the advertiser. Instead of nofollowing each and every link, which is painful and you&#8217;re bound to forget at some point, why not make sure search engines can&#8217;t follow the link at all?</li>
<li><strong>&#8220;Clean&#8221; links</strong><br />
It might be obvious when you&#8217;re linking to Amazon that the link points to Amazon, but when I link to say, Genesis, using my affiliate link, the link would point to shareasale.com, which in turn would redirect to Genesis. So the URL of the link would be ugly and wouldn&#8217;t tell you where you&#8217;re going to. Instead, my &#8220;clean&#8221;, cloaked version of that affiliate link reads:http://yoast.com/out/genesis/That is a lot more telling about the destination isn&#8217;t it? I think it&#8217;s more user friendly.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Cloaking affiliate links, the how to</h2>
<p>The basic process of cloaking affiliate links is simple:</p>
<ol>
<li>Create a folder from where you&#8217;ll serve your redirects, I use <em>/out/</em>.</li>
<li>Block the <em>/out/</em> folder in your domains <em>robots.txt</em> file by adding:
<pre>Disallow: /out/</pre>
</li>
<li>Use a script in your redirect folder to redirect to your affiliate URLs.</li>
</ol>
<p>Step 2 makes sure search engines won&#8217;t follow the redirects, but we&#8217;ll add some extra safety with our script. Step 3 could be as easy as writing each redirect in your redirect directory&#8217;s <em>.htaccess</em> file manually. I personally prefer something that&#8217;s a bit easier to manage, which is why I&#8217;m giving you a little redirect script I wrote below. As a bonus, this should be easier to get working on NGINX too.</p>
<h2>Affiliate link redirect script</h2>
<p>This script consists of three parts. The <em>index.php</em> file is the file that handles the actual redirects, it does a 302 redirect and sends an <a href="http://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/">X-Robots-Tag header</a> along, which makes sure the search engines that obey those headers aren&#8217;t allowed to index or follow the URL, should you forget the robots.txt exclusion.</p>
<p>The <em>redirects.txt</em> file is a comma separated file with a very simple format:</p>
<p>name,destination-url</p>
<p>For instance:</p>
<p>yoast,http://yoast.com</p>
<p>It should always have the first line:</p>
<p>default,http://example.com</p>
<p>Where you can change example.com to your domain. This will make sure that people who try to redirect to non-existing redirects get redirected to your homepage.</p>
<p>If you install these two files, the script will already work. With the above setup, going to /out/?id=yoast on your server would redirect you to http://yoast.com.</p>
<p>Now I&#8217;m a bit of a URL freak and I actually like my URLs even cleaner than that, so there&#8217;s a bit of <em>.htaccess</em> involved as well. It&#8217;s only 5 lines and basically makes sure that you can link to /out/yoast and that would redirect you as well. This has the added bonus of preventing people from opening your redirects.txt file, so they can&#8217;t check out all your redirects.</p>
<p>Neat huh? You can <a href="https://gist.github.com/jdevalk/5622742/download">download the files</a> here, or <a href="https://gist.github.com/jdevalk/5622742">view their source here</a>. If you run NGINX, <a href="https://gist.github.com/jdevalk/5623050">this gist</a> contains some sample code for how to make that work.</p>
<p>Let me know in the comments if and when you use it and whether you run into any issues.</p>
<p>Note: I&#8217;d written about this topic in the past, specifically how to do it with WordPress plugins, the <a href="http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/#analytics">Analytics bit of that post</a> might still be very useful.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/">How to cloak your affiliate links</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/tGiFxNVwZhw" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:44:"http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"40";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:104:"http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cloak-affiliate-links";}s:7:"summary";s:800:"<p>We regularly review sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. I&#8217;ve always said and will continue to say that affiliate links should be redirected through a redirect script, but when we tried to help a client by linking to a proper explanation and example script, we couldn&#8217;t find one. So, in true Yoast style, I wrote&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/">How to cloak your affiliate links</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:6146:"<p>We regularly <a href="https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/">review sites</a> that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. I&#8217;ve always said and will continue to say that affiliate links should be redirected through a redirect script, but when we tried to help a client by linking to a proper explanation and example script, we couldn&#8217;t find one. So, in true Yoast style, I wrote a script and decided to write this article that outlines exactly how and why to use it.</p>
<h2>Why should I cloak my affiliate links?</h2>
<p>If you search online for it, there are tons of reasons for people to redirect their affiliate links. The &#8220;historical&#8221; reason for cloaking affiliate links is hiding that you&#8217;re an affiliate for the search engines. Now I&#8217;m not one to think the search engines are stupid enough to be fooled by an easy script like the one I&#8217;m providing below, but there are more reasons. The funny thing is that it&#8217;s called cloaking affiliate links because of that history, but I digress. Let me give you the three reasons why I do it and why I think every affiliate should be cloaking their affiliate links:</p>
<ol>
<li><span style="line-height: 13px;"><strong>Ease of management</strong><br />
You sometimes have to change your affiliate links. If you have to change them in more than one place, it&#8217;s bound to be a painful exercise, so you want to centralize management.</span></li>
<li><strong>Prevent leaking PageRank to advertisers</strong><br />
While sometimes you might want to &#8220;hide&#8221; for a search engine that you&#8217;re an affiliate, for  me the reasoning is actually the other way around. Affiliate links are ads, and those <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569">should be nofollowed</a> or otherwise prevented from leaking PageRank to the advertiser. Instead of nofollowing each and every link, which is painful and you&#8217;re bound to forget at some point, why not make sure search engines can&#8217;t follow the link at all?</li>
<li><strong>&#8220;Clean&#8221; links</strong><br />
It might be obvious when you&#8217;re linking to Amazon that the link points to Amazon, but when I link to say, Genesis, using my affiliate link, the link would point to shareasale.com, which in turn would redirect to Genesis. So the URL of the link would be ugly and wouldn&#8217;t tell you where you&#8217;re going to. Instead, my &#8220;clean&#8221;, cloaked version of that affiliate link reads:http://yoast.com/out/genesis/That is a lot more telling about the destination isn&#8217;t it? I think it&#8217;s more user friendly.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Cloaking affiliate links, the how to</h2>
<p>The basic process of cloaking affiliate links is simple:</p>
<ol>
<li>Create a folder from where you&#8217;ll serve your redirects, I use <em>/out/</em>.</li>
<li>Block the <em>/out/</em> folder in your domains <em>robots.txt</em> file by adding:
<pre>Disallow: /out/</pre>
</li>
<li>Use a script in your redirect folder to redirect to your affiliate URLs.</li>
</ol>
<p>Step 2 makes sure search engines won&#8217;t follow the redirects, but we&#8217;ll add some extra safety with our script. Step 3 could be as easy as writing each redirect in your redirect directory&#8217;s <em>.htaccess</em> file manually. I personally prefer something that&#8217;s a bit easier to manage, which is why I&#8217;m giving you a little redirect script I wrote below. As a bonus, this should be easier to get working on NGINX too.</p>
<h2>Affiliate link redirect script</h2>
<p>This script consists of three parts. The <em>index.php</em> file is the file that handles the actual redirects, it does a 302 redirect and sends an <a href="http://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/">X-Robots-Tag header</a> along, which makes sure the search engines that obey those headers aren&#8217;t allowed to index or follow the URL, should you forget the robots.txt exclusion.</p>
<p>The <em>redirects.txt</em> file is a comma separated file with a very simple format:</p>
<p>name,destination-url</p>
<p>For instance:</p>
<p>yoast,http://yoast.com</p>
<p>It should always have the first line:</p>
<p>default,http://example.com</p>
<p>Where you can change example.com to your domain. This will make sure that people who try to redirect to non-existing redirects get redirected to your homepage.</p>
<p>If you install these two files, the script will already work. With the above setup, going to /out/?id=yoast on your server would redirect you to http://yoast.com.</p>
<p>Now I&#8217;m a bit of a URL freak and I actually like my URLs even cleaner than that, so there&#8217;s a bit of <em>.htaccess</em> involved as well. It&#8217;s only 5 lines and basically makes sure that you can link to /out/yoast and that would redirect you as well. This has the added bonus of preventing people from opening your redirects.txt file, so they can&#8217;t check out all your redirects.</p>
<p>Neat huh? You can <a href="https://gist.github.com/jdevalk/5622742/download">download the files</a> here, or <a href="https://gist.github.com/jdevalk/5622742">view their source here</a>. If you run NGINX, <a href="https://gist.github.com/jdevalk/5623050">this gist</a> contains some sample code for how to make that work.</p>
<p>Let me know in the comments if and when you use it and whether you run into any issues.</p>
<p>Note: I&#8217;d written about this topic in the past, specifically how to do it with WordPress plugins, the <a href="http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/#analytics">Analytics bit of that post</a> might still be very useful.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/">How to cloak your affiliate links</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/tGiFxNVwZhw" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:8;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:33:"WordPress SEO Community & Roadmap";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/ZKOKmmGbYTs/";s:8:"comments";s:58:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-community-roadmap/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 14 May 2013 10:58:07 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:39:"WordPressWordPress PluginsWordPress SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=86090";s:11:"description";s:823:"<p>Our WordPress SEO plugin has been getting more and more downloads, bringing it to the top of the most downloaded plugin chart on WordPress.org fairly regularly. With that comes more interest from other developers as well, which is something we absolutely love, but is kind of impossible to manage properly on WordPress.org. Which is why we&#8217;ve&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-community-roadmap/">WordPress SEO Community &#038; Roadmap</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:54:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-community-roadmap/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"41";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:42:"WordPress SEO development moved  to Github";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:124:"http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-community-roadmap/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-seo-community-roadmap";}s:7:"summary";s:823:"<p>Our WordPress SEO plugin has been getting more and more downloads, bringing it to the top of the most downloaded plugin chart on WordPress.org fairly regularly. With that comes more interest from other developers as well, which is something we absolutely love, but is kind of impossible to manage properly on WordPress.org. Which is why we&#8217;ve&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-community-roadmap/">WordPress SEO Community &#038; Roadmap</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:9;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:33:"Why we moved to all email support";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/2FtMFy9RErA/";s:8:"comments";s:44:"http://yoast.com/all-email-support/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 17 Apr 2013 20:18:07 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:13:"BusinessEmail";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=82087";s:11:"description";s:782:"<p>When we started doing premium WordPress plugins, we also added a support forum to yoast.com. Many people liked this but I was, to be honest, skeptic. My experience with the WordPress.org forums are &#8230; Poor, at best. I just don&#8217;t think forums work very well, in large part because there is an ever continuing tendency&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/all-email-support/">Why we moved to all email support</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:40:"http://yoast.com/all-email-support/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"56";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:20:"HelpScout Custom App";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:96:"http://yoast.com/all-email-support/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=all-email-support";}s:7:"summary";s:782:"<p>When we started doing premium WordPress plugins, we also added a support forum to yoast.com. Many people liked this but I was, to be honest, skeptic. My experience with the WordPress.org forums are &#8230; Poor, at best. I just don&#8217;t think forums work very well, in large part because there is an ever continuing tendency&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/all-email-support/">Why we moved to all email support</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:10;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:39:"The future of SEO plugins for WordPress";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/BYdZfDMj7cI/";s:8:"comments";s:55:"http://yoast.com/future-wordpress-seo-plugins/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:18:40 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:43:"WordPressWordPress HostingWordPress Plugins";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=80120";s:11:"description";s:771:"<p>I find myself becoming more and more defensive of WordPress SEO plugins, my own in particular. When people make jokes about them I tend to get angry, which is perhaps a stupid reaction, but it made me think: why would people make jokes about them, are they that stupid? What does the future hold for&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/future-wordpress-seo-plugins/">The future of SEO plugins for WordPress</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:19:"Array
			
		
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:51:"http://yoast.com/future-wordpress-seo-plugins/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"86";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:8:"
			
			";s:13:"content_title";s:57:"Squirrly snippet preview screenshotSquirrly SEO assistant";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:118:"http://yoast.com/future-wordpress-seo-plugins/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=future-wordpress-seo-plugins";}s:7:"summary";s:771:"<p>I find myself becoming more and more defensive of WordPress SEO plugins, my own in particular. When people make jokes about them I tend to get angry, which is perhaps a stupid reaction, but it made me think: why would people make jokes about them, are they that stupid? What does the future hold for&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/future-wordpress-seo-plugins/">The future of SEO plugins for WordPress</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:11;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:47:"Why Google won’t display the right page title";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/2QmwjDoxvWU/";s:8:"comments";s:44:"http://yoast.com/google-page-title/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:04:28 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:3:"SEO";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=77057";s:11:"description";s:841:"<p>Lately we&#8217;ve been inundated, literally, with support requests for WordPress SEO and its premium add-ons, all asking one &#8220;simple&#8221; thing: why isn&#8217;t Google picking up my page title? People who changed their page title and see that the search results still show their old title are bound to think Google didn&#8217;t &#8220;get&#8221; the new title&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/google-page-title/">Why Google won&#8217;t display the right page title</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:3828:"<p>Lately we&#8217;ve been inundated, literally, with support requests for WordPress SEO and its premium add-ons, all asking one &#8220;simple&#8221; thing: why isn&#8217;t Google picking up my page title? People who changed their page title and see that the search results still show their old title are bound to think Google didn&#8217;t &#8220;get&#8221; the new title yet and of course they blame their SEO plugin (sigh).</p>
<p>Well, this time, it&#8217;s not our fault&#8230; Google does all sorts of things to your title. It sometimes <a href="http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles">replaces it with parts of your URL</a>, but it&#8217;s also known to add the brand to the end of your title, or just completely rewrite it when it feels like it.</p>
<p>In its <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=35624">help doc about titles and descriptions</a>, Google says the following:</p>
<blockquote><p>If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.</p></blockquote>
<p>So&#8230; Basically, Google says: we know better, you can try and write a title we like, but we reserve to do whatever to make people click on your result.</p>
<p>There is <em>no</em> way to prevent this from happening right now. Which is annoying in many ways, but not something we can help, sorry. If you&#8217;re mad about it, or find it annoying, tweet to <a href="https://twitter.com/mattcutts">@mattcutts</a>, maybe he&#8217;ll do something about it. In the past Google sometimes used the open directory projects title for a page instead of the page title, and there was a <code>&lt;meta name="robots" content="noodp"/&gt;</code> tag to prevent this from happening. I&#8217;d love to see something similar for this, but it&#8217;s not there yet.</p>
<h2>But&#8230;. What we do learn from this.</h2>
<p>Write proper page titles. Not overly optimized titles targeting a gazillion keywords. No. Proper, one sentence titles that contain your brand name and your focus keyword. It&#8217;s not hard, just do it. And for your homepage your title should probably start with your brand name, 50% of the emails we get is about homepages where people have ridiculously optimized titles instead of just the name of their company.</p>
<p>Which is probably also why we <em>won&#8217;t</em> get something similar to NOODP anymore. We&#8217;ve broken the usability of the web, Google is trying to fix it for its users.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/google-page-title/">Why Google won&#8217;t display the right page title</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/2QmwjDoxvWU" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:40:"http://yoast.com/google-page-title/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"39";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:96:"http://yoast.com/google-page-title/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=google-page-title";}s:7:"summary";s:841:"<p>Lately we&#8217;ve been inundated, literally, with support requests for WordPress SEO and its premium add-ons, all asking one &#8220;simple&#8221; thing: why isn&#8217;t Google picking up my page title? People who changed their page title and see that the search results still show their old title are bound to think Google didn&#8217;t &#8220;get&#8221; the new title&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/google-page-title/">Why Google won&#8217;t display the right page title</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:3828:"<p>Lately we&#8217;ve been inundated, literally, with support requests for WordPress SEO and its premium add-ons, all asking one &#8220;simple&#8221; thing: why isn&#8217;t Google picking up my page title? People who changed their page title and see that the search results still show their old title are bound to think Google didn&#8217;t &#8220;get&#8221; the new title yet and of course they blame their SEO plugin (sigh).</p>
<p>Well, this time, it&#8217;s not our fault&#8230; Google does all sorts of things to your title. It sometimes <a href="http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles">replaces it with parts of your URL</a>, but it&#8217;s also known to add the brand to the end of your title, or just completely rewrite it when it feels like it.</p>
<p>In its <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=35624">help doc about titles and descriptions</a>, Google says the following:</p>
<blockquote><p>If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.</p></blockquote>
<p>So&#8230; Basically, Google says: we know better, you can try and write a title we like, but we reserve to do whatever to make people click on your result.</p>
<p>There is <em>no</em> way to prevent this from happening right now. Which is annoying in many ways, but not something we can help, sorry. If you&#8217;re mad about it, or find it annoying, tweet to <a href="https://twitter.com/mattcutts">@mattcutts</a>, maybe he&#8217;ll do something about it. In the past Google sometimes used the open directory projects title for a page instead of the page title, and there was a <code>&lt;meta name="robots" content="noodp"/&gt;</code> tag to prevent this from happening. I&#8217;d love to see something similar for this, but it&#8217;s not there yet.</p>
<h2>But&#8230;. What we do learn from this.</h2>
<p>Write proper page titles. Not overly optimized titles targeting a gazillion keywords. No. Proper, one sentence titles that contain your brand name and your focus keyword. It&#8217;s not hard, just do it. And for your homepage your title should probably start with your brand name, 50% of the emails we get is about homepages where people have ridiculously optimized titles instead of just the name of their company.</p>
<p>Which is probably also why we <em>won&#8217;t</em> get something similar to NOODP anymore. We&#8217;ve broken the usability of the web, Google is trying to fix it for its users.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/google-page-title/">Why Google won&#8217;t display the right page title</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/2QmwjDoxvWU" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:12;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:69:"Why I Switched to Copyblogger’s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/BzzOtDKmaMk/";s:8:"comments";s:62:"http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:52:16 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:36:"WordPressSite SpeedWordPress Hosting";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=75855";s:11:"description";s:862:"<p>Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to Synthesis, the managed WordPress hosting platform operated by Copyblogger Media. Previously this site had been hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/">Why I Switched to Copyblogger&#8217;s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:6068:"<p>Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to <a href="http://yoast.com/out/synthesis/" target="_blank">Synthesis</a>, the managed <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-hosting/" target="_blank">WordPress hosting</a> platform operated by <a href="http://copyblogger.com" target="_blank">Copyblogger Media</a>.</p>
<p>Previously this site had been hosted on a <a href="http://yoast.com/out/vps/" target="_blank">VPS.net Cloud Server</a>, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.</p>
<p>But there are features of Synthesis that I realized I could no longer live without.</p>
<h2>Optimized WordPress Performance</h2>
<p>First, I don&#8217;t want to do my own Linux optimization anymore. Now I won&#8217;t have to.</p>
<p>The Synthesis team developed its Linux server stack specifically to handle high traffic loads on WordPress websites. They have spent the last several years tweaking and perfecting this setup to provide the outstanding performance, reliability, and security that Synthesis does today.</p>
<p>Simply put, the Synthesis team knows WordPress and they know server performance. I wanted to align with a team that understands WordPress performance better than I do. Now I have.</p>
<h2>Theme Support</h2>
<p>The second reason for the switch is that Synthesis, as part of Copyblogger, can simultaneously support my hosting <em>and </em>my theme.</p>
<p>Yoast.com runs on the Genesis Framework, developed by Copyblogger&#8217;s <a href="http://yoast.com/out/studiopress/" target="_blank">StudioPress</a> design team. Yes, I could host Yoast.com anywhere and still have access to StudioPress support, but no other hosting platform is specifically tuned for Genesis. This further optimizes performance and security, and it makes updates a breeze.</p>
<p>Plus, the Synthesis support staff is proactive about troubleshooting and quickly fixing issues specific to Genesis. A support question that might have taken two or three tickets to answer previously now will take just one because of the Synthesis/Genesis integration.</p>
<h2>Cutting Edge Value</h2>
<p>Copyblogger Media hosts its own business websites on regular plans from Synthesis. Beyond performance, Synthesis was designed to support the operational needs of the site owner versus that of the hosting company, and thus provides a few features that are unique among hosting providers.</p>
<h3><strong>Operations</strong></h3>
<p>First, Synthesis provides their customers with an uptime checker called <a href="http://yoast.com/out/site-sensor/" target="_blank">Site Sensor</a>.</p>
<p>Beyond normal uptime checks, it can actually perform WordPress-specific checks which ensure RSS feeds and sitemaps are current. A website with broken SEO and content distribution mechanics might as well be down. The sitemap checker even supports the indexed sitemaps produced by our own <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/" target="_blank">WordPress SEO</a> plugin, I worked with the Synthesis team to add that functionality.</p>
<p>Second, Synthesis has backups down to a science.</p>
<p>Synthesis already backs up my server on a nightly basis and ships it across the U.S. to a second data center. They also make local WordPress-specific backups that make it easy for their support staff to replace plugins, WP options settings, and more at a moment&#8217;s notice. Beyond this, they provide a database snapshot tool that I can use to back up my database before plugin and WP upgrades.</p>
<p>Additionally, they are soon releasing a feature called Personal Backups for S3 that will allow me to send a backup to my own S3 bucket at Amazon. Unlike normal backup plugins, this service is actually driven by robust server-side processes and is not dependent on PHP.</p>
<h3><strong>Site Speed</strong></h3>
<p>Finally, I switched to Synthesis because I trust their technical aptitude and respect their forward-thinking mindset.</p>
<p>For example, some of you may have heard about <a href="http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper" target="_blank">SPDY</a>, Google&#8217;s initiative to speed up the web by improving HTTP and TCP. I certainly have, and it is a feature I wanted implemented on our HTTPS forums and checkout pages.</p>
<p>With this move to Synthesis, I&#8217;ll have it.</p>
<p>SPDY requires server-side and browser support. (For a list of compatible web browsers, <a href="http://caniuse.com/spdy" target="_blank">click here</a>.) Synthesis is one of the first WordPress-only hosts to offer SPDY compatibility for qualified sites, having already <a href="http://yoast.com/out/synthesis-spdy/" target="_blank">tested it on a few of their own most valuable properties</a>.</p>
<p>This is just the latest example of Synthesis consistently evolving to provide more value for its customers&#8217; hosting dollar.</p>
<h2>A True Partner</h2>
<p>In Synthesis, I don&#8217;t see a hosting provider. I see a hosting partner. This is what I needed as Yoast.com continues to grow and evolve.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll now have more time to spend doing what I love &#8212; writing plugins, reviewing websites, even <a href="http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/" target="_blank">writing Genesis child themes</a> &#8212; while the Synthesis team will make sure that the site is up and ready to take advantage of the next development in WordPress hosting.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/">Why I Switched to Copyblogger&#8217;s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/BzzOtDKmaMk" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:58:"http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"53";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:132:"http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting";}s:7:"summary";s:862:"<p>Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to Synthesis, the managed WordPress hosting platform operated by Copyblogger Media. Previously this site had been hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/">Why I Switched to Copyblogger&#8217;s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:6068:"<p>Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to <a href="http://yoast.com/out/synthesis/" target="_blank">Synthesis</a>, the managed <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-hosting/" target="_blank">WordPress hosting</a> platform operated by <a href="http://copyblogger.com" target="_blank">Copyblogger Media</a>.</p>
<p>Previously this site had been hosted on a <a href="http://yoast.com/out/vps/" target="_blank">VPS.net Cloud Server</a>, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.</p>
<p>But there are features of Synthesis that I realized I could no longer live without.</p>
<h2>Optimized WordPress Performance</h2>
<p>First, I don&#8217;t want to do my own Linux optimization anymore. Now I won&#8217;t have to.</p>
<p>The Synthesis team developed its Linux server stack specifically to handle high traffic loads on WordPress websites. They have spent the last several years tweaking and perfecting this setup to provide the outstanding performance, reliability, and security that Synthesis does today.</p>
<p>Simply put, the Synthesis team knows WordPress and they know server performance. I wanted to align with a team that understands WordPress performance better than I do. Now I have.</p>
<h2>Theme Support</h2>
<p>The second reason for the switch is that Synthesis, as part of Copyblogger, can simultaneously support my hosting <em>and </em>my theme.</p>
<p>Yoast.com runs on the Genesis Framework, developed by Copyblogger&#8217;s <a href="http://yoast.com/out/studiopress/" target="_blank">StudioPress</a> design team. Yes, I could host Yoast.com anywhere and still have access to StudioPress support, but no other hosting platform is specifically tuned for Genesis. This further optimizes performance and security, and it makes updates a breeze.</p>
<p>Plus, the Synthesis support staff is proactive about troubleshooting and quickly fixing issues specific to Genesis. A support question that might have taken two or three tickets to answer previously now will take just one because of the Synthesis/Genesis integration.</p>
<h2>Cutting Edge Value</h2>
<p>Copyblogger Media hosts its own business websites on regular plans from Synthesis. Beyond performance, Synthesis was designed to support the operational needs of the site owner versus that of the hosting company, and thus provides a few features that are unique among hosting providers.</p>
<h3><strong>Operations</strong></h3>
<p>First, Synthesis provides their customers with an uptime checker called <a href="http://yoast.com/out/site-sensor/" target="_blank">Site Sensor</a>.</p>
<p>Beyond normal uptime checks, it can actually perform WordPress-specific checks which ensure RSS feeds and sitemaps are current. A website with broken SEO and content distribution mechanics might as well be down. The sitemap checker even supports the indexed sitemaps produced by our own <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/" target="_blank">WordPress SEO</a> plugin, I worked with the Synthesis team to add that functionality.</p>
<p>Second, Synthesis has backups down to a science.</p>
<p>Synthesis already backs up my server on a nightly basis and ships it across the U.S. to a second data center. They also make local WordPress-specific backups that make it easy for their support staff to replace plugins, WP options settings, and more at a moment&#8217;s notice. Beyond this, they provide a database snapshot tool that I can use to back up my database before plugin and WP upgrades.</p>
<p>Additionally, they are soon releasing a feature called Personal Backups for S3 that will allow me to send a backup to my own S3 bucket at Amazon. Unlike normal backup plugins, this service is actually driven by robust server-side processes and is not dependent on PHP.</p>
<h3><strong>Site Speed</strong></h3>
<p>Finally, I switched to Synthesis because I trust their technical aptitude and respect their forward-thinking mindset.</p>
<p>For example, some of you may have heard about <a href="http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper" target="_blank">SPDY</a>, Google&#8217;s initiative to speed up the web by improving HTTP and TCP. I certainly have, and it is a feature I wanted implemented on our HTTPS forums and checkout pages.</p>
<p>With this move to Synthesis, I&#8217;ll have it.</p>
<p>SPDY requires server-side and browser support. (For a list of compatible web browsers, <a href="http://caniuse.com/spdy" target="_blank">click here</a>.) Synthesis is one of the first WordPress-only hosts to offer SPDY compatibility for qualified sites, having already <a href="http://yoast.com/out/synthesis-spdy/" target="_blank">tested it on a few of their own most valuable properties</a>.</p>
<p>This is just the latest example of Synthesis consistently evolving to provide more value for its customers&#8217; hosting dollar.</p>
<h2>A True Partner</h2>
<p>In Synthesis, I don&#8217;t see a hosting provider. I see a hosting partner. This is what I needed as Yoast.com continues to grow and evolve.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll now have more time to spend doing what I love &#8212; writing plugins, reviewing websites, even <a href="http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/" target="_blank">writing Genesis child themes</a> &#8212; while the Synthesis team will make sure that the site is up and ready to take advantage of the next development in WordPress hosting.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/">Why I Switched to Copyblogger&#8217;s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/BzzOtDKmaMk" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:13;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:60:"On focus, and how we’re slowly changing our business model";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/LFTjA6qmaDA/";s:8:"comments";s:83:"http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:35:31 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:8:"Business";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=75688";s:11:"description";s:839:"<p>Warning: this isn&#8217;t the usual SEO / WordPress related post, but more of a &#8220;personal&#8221; post about how I&#8217;ve gone about building and changing my / our business. When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there. It was a side job to&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/">On focus, and how we&#8217;re slowly changing our business model</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:5771:"<p>Warning: this isn&#8217;t the usual SEO / WordPress related post, but more of a &#8220;personal&#8221; post about how I&#8217;ve gone about building and changing my / our business.</p>
<p>When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there. It was a side job to my consulting jobs at online marketing agencies. My WordPress plugins were just a hobby and not something I thought I could ever make a living from. In 2010 I decided I was going to go solo, leaving my agency and doing consultancy for less clients, but more intensively.</p>
<p>Doing this freed up time to do more development <em>and</em> do product development. I found myself doing more and more one-off reviews of websites, people just needing a good critique of what they were doing and a list of things they should improve. This evolved into what is now our <a href="https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/">website review service</a> and a very large chunk of our business. The good thing about that is that it doesn&#8217;t require me to go off-site, we can do it all from within our office here and I can spend a lot more time on research &amp; development that way, figuring out how to further optimize people&#8217;s websites.</p>
<p>Last year I decided I&#8217;d start to sell premium plugins, with our <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/">Video SEO plugin</a> being the first premium offering and this has gone amazingly well. So much so that I hired my brother Thijs to assist in support. Last week we launched our second premium plugin, <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/local-seo/">Local SEO</a>, which I built together with <a href="http://www.uprise.nl">Arjan</a>. It&#8217;s doing great so far and we&#8217;re happy with the feedback we&#8217;re getting, which is pretty exciting.</p>
<h2>Firing clients</h2>
<p>The combination of website reviews and premium plugins means I have less and less time to actually spend on consulting face-to-face with clients. I kept telling myself that my consulting clients were where I got new ideas for products and I thus needed to keeping doing that consulting. But that&#8217;s not true, I was just looking for an excuse. My consulting clients are all big online companies whereas our products are aimed at publishers, SME&#8217;s and their online marketing agencies mostly&#8230; In fact, the truly good new ideas for products are coming from our website reviews, because we&#8217;re selling those to exactly the SME&#8217;s we&#8217;re targeting our other products at.</p>
<p>What I will keep doing is training people, in our Dutch office, because in talking with them and in finding problems that people have when they make their first SEO steps or when they &#8220;grow&#8221; in their SEO expertise, that&#8217;s where I learn too. That&#8217;s a good &#8220;breeding ground&#8221; for other stuff. SEO strategy consulting for large online brands&#8230; Not so much.</p>
<p>Because of this, in the last few days, I&#8217;ve gone through a <em>very</em> weird process: I&#8217;ve been &#8220;firing&#8221; some of my remaining clients. I&#8217;ll keep a few consulting clients around because they&#8217;re too interesting, I&#8217;m doing an awesome project at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">the Guardian</a> for instance, which really <em>is</em> teaching me new things about publishing, the web in general and SEO specifically. But most of my other clients will have to find another &#8220;home&#8221;. Luckily I&#8217;ve got a lot of good friends in the industry who can pick up where I&#8217;m leaving in a great way and with more time and enthusiasm than I can at this point.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll keep some room in my agenda for 3 &#8211; 4 consulting clients a year, those will be reserved for major online publishers specifically as that&#8217;s where I feel I can make a difference <em>and</em> learn a lot at the same time (<a href="https://yoast.com/hire-us/seo-consulting-services/">you can apply here</a>, though there&#8217;s only 1 spot left for this year). People that approach me for other work I&#8217;ll start saying no to and, if possible, refer them to industry friends.</p>
<h2>What&#8217;s next?</h2>
<p>With that behind me, I&#8217;ve got more time to focus on our existing site review and premium plugin business and on new products. We&#8217;ve got more cool stuff lined up: two more premium add-ons to WordPress SEO are slowly being specced and developed and we&#8217;re also going to go in a &#8220;new&#8221; direction, by releasing our first child-theme in a month or two. It&#8217;s going to be aimed at a very specific market and I&#8217;m very curious how it&#8217;ll pan out. It&#8217;ll be a <a href="http://yoast.com/wp-theme/genesis/">Genesis</a> child-theme, because I don&#8217;t really see a need to develop a new framework when there&#8217;s something as good as that out there already and I love working with the Copyblogger family.</p>
<p>The direction is clear though: we develop products aimed at SME&#8217;s, publishers and their SEO / online marketing agencies to help them build &amp; optimize their websites.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/">On focus, and how we&#8217;re slowly changing our business model</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/LFTjA6qmaDA" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:79:"http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"41";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:174:"http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model";}s:7:"summary";s:839:"<p>Warning: this isn&#8217;t the usual SEO / WordPress related post, but more of a &#8220;personal&#8221; post about how I&#8217;ve gone about building and changing my / our business. When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there. It was a side job to&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/">On focus, and how we&#8217;re slowly changing our business model</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:5771:"<p>Warning: this isn&#8217;t the usual SEO / WordPress related post, but more of a &#8220;personal&#8221; post about how I&#8217;ve gone about building and changing my / our business.</p>
<p>When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there. It was a side job to my consulting jobs at online marketing agencies. My WordPress plugins were just a hobby and not something I thought I could ever make a living from. In 2010 I decided I was going to go solo, leaving my agency and doing consultancy for less clients, but more intensively.</p>
<p>Doing this freed up time to do more development <em>and</em> do product development. I found myself doing more and more one-off reviews of websites, people just needing a good critique of what they were doing and a list of things they should improve. This evolved into what is now our <a href="https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/">website review service</a> and a very large chunk of our business. The good thing about that is that it doesn&#8217;t require me to go off-site, we can do it all from within our office here and I can spend a lot more time on research &amp; development that way, figuring out how to further optimize people&#8217;s websites.</p>
<p>Last year I decided I&#8217;d start to sell premium plugins, with our <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/">Video SEO plugin</a> being the first premium offering and this has gone amazingly well. So much so that I hired my brother Thijs to assist in support. Last week we launched our second premium plugin, <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/local-seo/">Local SEO</a>, which I built together with <a href="http://www.uprise.nl">Arjan</a>. It&#8217;s doing great so far and we&#8217;re happy with the feedback we&#8217;re getting, which is pretty exciting.</p>
<h2>Firing clients</h2>
<p>The combination of website reviews and premium plugins means I have less and less time to actually spend on consulting face-to-face with clients. I kept telling myself that my consulting clients were where I got new ideas for products and I thus needed to keeping doing that consulting. But that&#8217;s not true, I was just looking for an excuse. My consulting clients are all big online companies whereas our products are aimed at publishers, SME&#8217;s and their online marketing agencies mostly&#8230; In fact, the truly good new ideas for products are coming from our website reviews, because we&#8217;re selling those to exactly the SME&#8217;s we&#8217;re targeting our other products at.</p>
<p>What I will keep doing is training people, in our Dutch office, because in talking with them and in finding problems that people have when they make their first SEO steps or when they &#8220;grow&#8221; in their SEO expertise, that&#8217;s where I learn too. That&#8217;s a good &#8220;breeding ground&#8221; for other stuff. SEO strategy consulting for large online brands&#8230; Not so much.</p>
<p>Because of this, in the last few days, I&#8217;ve gone through a <em>very</em> weird process: I&#8217;ve been &#8220;firing&#8221; some of my remaining clients. I&#8217;ll keep a few consulting clients around because they&#8217;re too interesting, I&#8217;m doing an awesome project at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">the Guardian</a> for instance, which really <em>is</em> teaching me new things about publishing, the web in general and SEO specifically. But most of my other clients will have to find another &#8220;home&#8221;. Luckily I&#8217;ve got a lot of good friends in the industry who can pick up where I&#8217;m leaving in a great way and with more time and enthusiasm than I can at this point.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll keep some room in my agenda for 3 &#8211; 4 consulting clients a year, those will be reserved for major online publishers specifically as that&#8217;s where I feel I can make a difference <em>and</em> learn a lot at the same time (<a href="https://yoast.com/hire-us/seo-consulting-services/">you can apply here</a>, though there&#8217;s only 1 spot left for this year). People that approach me for other work I&#8217;ll start saying no to and, if possible, refer them to industry friends.</p>
<h2>What&#8217;s next?</h2>
<p>With that behind me, I&#8217;ve got more time to focus on our existing site review and premium plugin business and on new products. We&#8217;ve got more cool stuff lined up: two more premium add-ons to WordPress SEO are slowly being specced and developed and we&#8217;re also going to go in a &#8220;new&#8221; direction, by releasing our first child-theme in a month or two. It&#8217;s going to be aimed at a very specific market and I&#8217;m very curious how it&#8217;ll pan out. It&#8217;ll be a <a href="http://yoast.com/wp-theme/genesis/">Genesis</a> child-theme, because I don&#8217;t really see a need to develop a new framework when there&#8217;s something as good as that out there already and I love working with the Copyblogger family.</p>
<p>The direction is clear though: we develop products aimed at SME&#8217;s, publishers and their SEO / online marketing agencies to help them build &amp; optimize their websites.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/on-focus-and-how-were-slowly-changing-our-business-model/">On focus, and how we&#8217;re slowly changing our business model</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/LFTjA6qmaDA" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:14;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:53:"HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/6LITDFfAkmg/";s:8:"comments";s:56:"http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:33:44 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:25:"SEOHTTP headersServerside";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=74489";s:11:"description";s:832:"<p>Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn&#8217;t access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn&#8217;t handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the last bit might be interesting for more advanced&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/">HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:7834:"<p>Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn&#8217;t access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn&#8217;t handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the <a href="#varnish">last bit</a> might be interesting for more advanced users. The message from Google Webmaster Tools read like this:</p>
<blockquote><p>Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 41 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn&#8217;t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site&#8217;s overall robots.txt error rate is 7.0%</p></blockquote>
<h2>HTTP status codes and search engines</h2>
<p>A search engine constantly verifies whether content it&#8217;s linking to stille exist and hasn&#8217;t changed.  It verifies two things:</p>
<ol>
<li>is the content still being served with the correct HTTP status code (HTTP 200);</li>
<li>is it still the same content.</li>
</ol>
<p>An HTTP 200 status code means: all is well, here is the content you asked for. It is the <em>only </em>correct status code for content. If content has moved, you can redirect it, either permanently, with an HTTP 301 header, or temporarily, with an HTTP 302 or 307 header.</p>
<p>If your server gives <em>any</em> other HTTP status header, it means the search engine can no longer find the content. If you server gives a 200 HTTP status code, but the page is in fact an error and says something like &#8220;File not found&#8221; or has very little content, Google will classify it as a <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=181708">soft 404</a> in Google Webmaster Tools.</p>
<p>There is only one proper way of telling the search engine that you&#8217;re doing site maintenance:</p>
<h2>How server downtime works for search engines</h2>
<p>If, during a crawl, a search engine finds that some content no longer exists, ie. it gives a 404 HTTP status, it will usually remove that content from the search results until it can come back and verify that it&#8217;s there again. If this happens often, it&#8217;ll take longer and longer for the content to come back in the search results.</p>
<p>What you should be doing is giving a 503 HTTP status code. This is the definition of the 503 status code from <a href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html">the RFC that defines these status codes</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.</p></blockquote>
<p>So, you have to send a 503 status code <em>in combination with</em> a Retry-After header. Basically you&#8217;re saying: hang on, we&#8217;re doing some maintenance, please come back in X minutes. That sounds a lot better than what a 404 error says: &#8220;Not Found&#8221;. A 404 literally means that the server can&#8217;t find anything to return for the URL that was given.</p>
<h2>How do I send a 503 header?</h2>
<p>In PHP the code for a 503 would be like this:</p>
<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">$protocol = &quot;HTTP/1.0&quot;;
if ( &quot;HTTP/1.1&quot; == $_SERVER[&quot;SERVER_PROTOCOL&quot;] )
  $protocol = &quot;HTTP/1.1&quot;;
header( &quot;$protocol 503 Service Unavailable&quot;, true, 503 );
header( &quot;Retry-After: 3600&quot; );</pre>
<p>The delay time, 3600 in the above example, is given in seconds, so 3600 corresponds to 60 minutes. You can also specify the exact time when the visitor should come back, by sending a GMT date instead of the number of seconds. This would result in something like this:</p>
<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">header( &quot;Retry-After: Fri, 19 Mar 2013 12:00:00 GMT&quot; );</pre>
<p>Use that with caution though, setting it to a wrong date might give unexpected results!</p>
<h2>Our site is never down, we&#8217;re on WordPress</h2>
<p>Nonsense. Every time you upgrade your core WordPress install, or when you&#8217;re updating plugins, WordPress will give a maintenance page. The default page sends out a proper 503 header. You can replace the default error page with a <em>maintenance.php</em> file in your <em>wp-content</em> folder, but if you do, you <em>have</em> to make sure that file sends out the proper 503 headers too. You can copy the code from the <a href="http://queryposts.com/function/wp_maintenance/"><code>wp_maintenance()</code></a> function.</p>
<p>If your database is down, WordPress actually sends an internal server error, using the <a href="http://queryposts.com/function/dead_db/"><code>dead_db()</code></a> function. If you&#8217;re doing planned maintenance on your database, therefore, you&#8217;ll need to set up a custom database error message page, <em>db-error.php</em> in your <em>wp-content</em> folder that sends a proper 503 header.</p>
<h2 id="varnish">Beware caches!</h2>
<p>So where did our client go wrong?</p>
<p>Funnily enough, our client <em>had</em> properly configured 503 headers on their server. There was an issue though: they use a <a href="https://www.varnish-cache.org/">Varnish cache</a> and that Varnish didn&#8217;t transfer the 503 status code correctly, it replaced it with a &#8220;general&#8221; HTTP 500 status, causing Google to send out that error email. I haven&#8217;t had a chance to test whether that is default Varnish behavior or something they broke, but it&#8217;s worth testing for your environment.</p>
<h2>Pro tip: sending a 503 for your robots.txt</h2>
<p>Per <a href="https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/Gas8vjZ5fmB">this post</a> from Pierre Far of Google, if you send an HTTP 503 status code for your robots.txt, Google will halt all the crawling on your domain until it&#8217;s allowed to crawl the robots.txt again. This is actually a very useful way of preventing load on your server when doing maintenance. It still requires you to send a 503 for <em>every</em> URL on your server, including all static ones, but after Google has re-fetched the robots.txt it&#8217;ll probably stop hammering your server(s) for a while.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: know what HTTP headers you&#8217;re sending</h2>
<p>While writing this article I was reminded about a tweet quoting <a href="http://www.vanessafox.com/">Vanessa Fox</a> during last weeks SMX West:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" width="550"><p>It&#8217;s about more than number of pages crawled &#8211; you need to know about important pages &amp; what response code they return @<a href="https://twitter.com/vanessafox">vanessafox</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search/%23SMX">#SMX</a></p>
<p>&mdash; Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) <a href="https://twitter.com/ruthburr/status/311175630026850304">March 11, 2013</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p>I couldn&#8217;t agree more and would add to that: <em>at all times</em>. Now go check those headers!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/">HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/6LITDFfAkmg" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:52:"http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"14";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:120:"http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=http-503-site-maintenance-seo";}s:7:"summary";s:832:"<p>Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn&#8217;t access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn&#8217;t handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the last bit might be interesting for more advanced&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/">HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:7834:"<p>Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn&#8217;t access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn&#8217;t handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the <a href="#varnish">last bit</a> might be interesting for more advanced users. The message from Google Webmaster Tools read like this:</p>
<blockquote><p>Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 41 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn&#8217;t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site&#8217;s overall robots.txt error rate is 7.0%</p></blockquote>
<h2>HTTP status codes and search engines</h2>
<p>A search engine constantly verifies whether content it&#8217;s linking to stille exist and hasn&#8217;t changed.  It verifies two things:</p>
<ol>
<li>is the content still being served with the correct HTTP status code (HTTP 200);</li>
<li>is it still the same content.</li>
</ol>
<p>An HTTP 200 status code means: all is well, here is the content you asked for. It is the <em>only </em>correct status code for content. If content has moved, you can redirect it, either permanently, with an HTTP 301 header, or temporarily, with an HTTP 302 or 307 header.</p>
<p>If your server gives <em>any</em> other HTTP status header, it means the search engine can no longer find the content. If you server gives a 200 HTTP status code, but the page is in fact an error and says something like &#8220;File not found&#8221; or has very little content, Google will classify it as a <a href="http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=181708">soft 404</a> in Google Webmaster Tools.</p>
<p>There is only one proper way of telling the search engine that you&#8217;re doing site maintenance:</p>
<h2>How server downtime works for search engines</h2>
<p>If, during a crawl, a search engine finds that some content no longer exists, ie. it gives a 404 HTTP status, it will usually remove that content from the search results until it can come back and verify that it&#8217;s there again. If this happens often, it&#8217;ll take longer and longer for the content to come back in the search results.</p>
<p>What you should be doing is giving a 503 HTTP status code. This is the definition of the 503 status code from <a href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html">the RFC that defines these status codes</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.</p></blockquote>
<p>So, you have to send a 503 status code <em>in combination with</em> a Retry-After header. Basically you&#8217;re saying: hang on, we&#8217;re doing some maintenance, please come back in X minutes. That sounds a lot better than what a 404 error says: &#8220;Not Found&#8221;. A 404 literally means that the server can&#8217;t find anything to return for the URL that was given.</p>
<h2>How do I send a 503 header?</h2>
<p>In PHP the code for a 503 would be like this:</p>
<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">$protocol = &quot;HTTP/1.0&quot;;
if ( &quot;HTTP/1.1&quot; == $_SERVER[&quot;SERVER_PROTOCOL&quot;] )
  $protocol = &quot;HTTP/1.1&quot;;
header( &quot;$protocol 503 Service Unavailable&quot;, true, 503 );
header( &quot;Retry-After: 3600&quot; );</pre>
<p>The delay time, 3600 in the above example, is given in seconds, so 3600 corresponds to 60 minutes. You can also specify the exact time when the visitor should come back, by sending a GMT date instead of the number of seconds. This would result in something like this:</p>
<pre class="brush: php; title: ; notranslate">header( &quot;Retry-After: Fri, 19 Mar 2013 12:00:00 GMT&quot; );</pre>
<p>Use that with caution though, setting it to a wrong date might give unexpected results!</p>
<h2>Our site is never down, we&#8217;re on WordPress</h2>
<p>Nonsense. Every time you upgrade your core WordPress install, or when you&#8217;re updating plugins, WordPress will give a maintenance page. The default page sends out a proper 503 header. You can replace the default error page with a <em>maintenance.php</em> file in your <em>wp-content</em> folder, but if you do, you <em>have</em> to make sure that file sends out the proper 503 headers too. You can copy the code from the <a href="http://queryposts.com/function/wp_maintenance/"><code>wp_maintenance()</code></a> function.</p>
<p>If your database is down, WordPress actually sends an internal server error, using the <a href="http://queryposts.com/function/dead_db/"><code>dead_db()</code></a> function. If you&#8217;re doing planned maintenance on your database, therefore, you&#8217;ll need to set up a custom database error message page, <em>db-error.php</em> in your <em>wp-content</em> folder that sends a proper 503 header.</p>
<h2 id="varnish">Beware caches!</h2>
<p>So where did our client go wrong?</p>
<p>Funnily enough, our client <em>had</em> properly configured 503 headers on their server. There was an issue though: they use a <a href="https://www.varnish-cache.org/">Varnish cache</a> and that Varnish didn&#8217;t transfer the 503 status code correctly, it replaced it with a &#8220;general&#8221; HTTP 500 status, causing Google to send out that error email. I haven&#8217;t had a chance to test whether that is default Varnish behavior or something they broke, but it&#8217;s worth testing for your environment.</p>
<h2>Pro tip: sending a 503 for your robots.txt</h2>
<p>Per <a href="https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/Gas8vjZ5fmB">this post</a> from Pierre Far of Google, if you send an HTTP 503 status code for your robots.txt, Google will halt all the crawling on your domain until it&#8217;s allowed to crawl the robots.txt again. This is actually a very useful way of preventing load on your server when doing maintenance. It still requires you to send a 503 for <em>every</em> URL on your server, including all static ones, but after Google has re-fetched the robots.txt it&#8217;ll probably stop hammering your server(s) for a while.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: know what HTTP headers you&#8217;re sending</h2>
<p>While writing this article I was reminded about a tweet quoting <a href="http://www.vanessafox.com/">Vanessa Fox</a> during last weeks SMX West:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" width="550"><p>It&#8217;s about more than number of pages crawled &#8211; you need to know about important pages &amp; what response code they return @<a href="https://twitter.com/vanessafox">vanessafox</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search/%23SMX">#SMX</a></p>
<p>&mdash; Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) <a href="https://twitter.com/ruthburr/status/311175630026850304">March 11, 2013</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p>I couldn&#8217;t agree more and would add to that: <em>at all times</em>. Now go check those headers!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/">HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/6LITDFfAkmg" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:15;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:20:"Local SEO made easy!";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/hGXAJczh0GQ/";s:8:"comments";s:46:"http://yoast.com/local-seo-made-easy/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:34:10 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:13:"SEOSchema.org";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=73356";s:11:"description";s:759:"<p>We&#8217;ve been hard at work here at Yoast.com, together with our good friend Arjan Snaterse, to complete the delivery of our next baby: the Local SEO plugin, which is, just like our Video SEO plugin, an extension to the WordPress SEO plugin. The Local SEO makes creating geo sitemaps and KML files a breeze, while&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/local-seo-made-easy/">Local SEO made easy!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:42:"http://yoast.com/local-seo-made-easy/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"68";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:18:"Local SEO by Yoast";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:100:"http://yoast.com/local-seo-made-easy/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=local-seo-made-easy";}s:7:"summary";s:759:"<p>We&#8217;ve been hard at work here at Yoast.com, together with our good friend Arjan Snaterse, to complete the delivery of our next baby: the Local SEO plugin, which is, just like our Video SEO plugin, an extension to the WordPress SEO plugin. The Local SEO makes creating geo sitemaps and KML files a breeze, while&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/local-seo-made-easy/">Local SEO made easy!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:16;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:45:"Why we don’t support old WordPress versions";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/i9CzOajL6_Q/";s:8:"comments";s:69:"http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:26:43 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:26:"WordPressWordPress Plugins";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=72530";s:11:"description";s:827:"<p>For all sorts of reasons, some people have a problem with updating WordPress installs properly. I will state now that for both our free and premium plugins we do not support anything but the latest and the prior to last version. At the time of writing that&#8217;s WordPress 3.5 and WordPress 3.4. If you&#8217;re running anything&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/">Why we don&#8217;t support old WordPress versions</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:3653:"<p>For all sorts of reasons, <em>some</em> people have a problem with updating WordPress installs properly. I will state now that for both our free and premium plugins we do not support anything but the latest and the prior to last version. At the time of writing that&#8217;s WordPress 3.5 and WordPress 3.4. If you&#8217;re running anything else, we can&#8217;t help you. But mostly, I want to convince you to upgrade by dispelling all the reasons why you shouldn&#8217;t or &#8220;couldn&#8217;t&#8221; upgrade.</p>
<p>The top four reasons we hear:</p>
<h2>#1: &#8220;my site / theme will break&#8221;</h2>
<p>Usually followed by &#8220;and I don&#8217;t have the time to fix it&#8221;. Well, plan some time or hire someone. This week. Because if you&#8217;re on WordPress 3.1 or 3.2, it&#8217;s a matter of time before you&#8217;ll get hacked. At that time you&#8217;ll not have the luxury of &#8220;planning&#8221; the upgrade, you&#8217;ll just have to suck it up and deal with it. Prevent that from happening and upgrade.</p>
<h2>#2: &#8220;our core modifications will be gone&#8221;</h2>
<p>Your what? You do realize that if you were to tinker with the code of  say, Microsoft Word, Microsoft wouldn&#8217;t be helping you either? That&#8217;s exactly how it works with us. Our plugins work with WordPress, not with what you did to it. Remove your core modifications and turn them into plugins so they behave as expected by other plugins and then: <strong>update</strong>.</p>
<h2>#3: &#8220;plugin x that we use won&#8217;t work anymore&#8221;</h2>
<p>Well, you&#8217;ve got three options:</p>
<ol>
<li>contact that plugins developer and ask him to fix it;</li>
<li>contact another developer and pay him to fix it;</li>
<li>drop the plugin and start using another plugin.</li>
</ol>
<h2>#4: &#8220;I don&#8217;t need any of the new functionality&#8221;</h2>
<p>WordPress is updated regularly, not just to add new functionality but to fix security issues too. Frankly, most people out there, probably including you, are not able to determine whether they need new functionality. WordPress 3.4 and 3.5 added API&#8217;s for developers that plugins that you&#8217;re using might want to use, not upgrading makes those plugins function less, or not at all.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>In short: upgrade. I know <a href="http://tommcfarlin.com/upgrade-wordpress/">some developers</a> out there are saying that we can&#8217;t &#8220;require&#8221; people to upgrade, well, I disagree. He compares it to Apple not forcing you to buy a new Mac when it breaks. The difference there is that we&#8217;re not talking about hardware. We&#8217;re talking about software. Apple regularly asks you to upgrade your system to fix battery issues or other issues.</p>
<p>In the end, it&#8217;s an economic decision: I&#8217;m not going to spend valuable support <em>and</em> development time on a minority that doesn&#8217;t want to upgrade, at the cost of not developing new features or fixing bugs for current versions of WordPress. So, if you want to use our plugins, stay current!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/">Why we don&#8217;t support old WordPress versions</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/i9CzOajL6_Q" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:65:"http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"23";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:146:"http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions";}s:7:"summary";s:827:"<p>For all sorts of reasons, some people have a problem with updating WordPress installs properly. I will state now that for both our free and premium plugins we do not support anything but the latest and the prior to last version. At the time of writing that&#8217;s WordPress 3.5 and WordPress 3.4. If you&#8217;re running anything&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/">Why we don&#8217;t support old WordPress versions</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:3653:"<p>For all sorts of reasons, <em>some</em> people have a problem with updating WordPress installs properly. I will state now that for both our free and premium plugins we do not support anything but the latest and the prior to last version. At the time of writing that&#8217;s WordPress 3.5 and WordPress 3.4. If you&#8217;re running anything else, we can&#8217;t help you. But mostly, I want to convince you to upgrade by dispelling all the reasons why you shouldn&#8217;t or &#8220;couldn&#8217;t&#8221; upgrade.</p>
<p>The top four reasons we hear:</p>
<h2>#1: &#8220;my site / theme will break&#8221;</h2>
<p>Usually followed by &#8220;and I don&#8217;t have the time to fix it&#8221;. Well, plan some time or hire someone. This week. Because if you&#8217;re on WordPress 3.1 or 3.2, it&#8217;s a matter of time before you&#8217;ll get hacked. At that time you&#8217;ll not have the luxury of &#8220;planning&#8221; the upgrade, you&#8217;ll just have to suck it up and deal with it. Prevent that from happening and upgrade.</p>
<h2>#2: &#8220;our core modifications will be gone&#8221;</h2>
<p>Your what? You do realize that if you were to tinker with the code of  say, Microsoft Word, Microsoft wouldn&#8217;t be helping you either? That&#8217;s exactly how it works with us. Our plugins work with WordPress, not with what you did to it. Remove your core modifications and turn them into plugins so they behave as expected by other plugins and then: <strong>update</strong>.</p>
<h2>#3: &#8220;plugin x that we use won&#8217;t work anymore&#8221;</h2>
<p>Well, you&#8217;ve got three options:</p>
<ol>
<li>contact that plugins developer and ask him to fix it;</li>
<li>contact another developer and pay him to fix it;</li>
<li>drop the plugin and start using another plugin.</li>
</ol>
<h2>#4: &#8220;I don&#8217;t need any of the new functionality&#8221;</h2>
<p>WordPress is updated regularly, not just to add new functionality but to fix security issues too. Frankly, most people out there, probably including you, are not able to determine whether they need new functionality. WordPress 3.4 and 3.5 added API&#8217;s for developers that plugins that you&#8217;re using might want to use, not upgrading makes those plugins function less, or not at all.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>In short: upgrade. I know <a href="http://tommcfarlin.com/upgrade-wordpress/">some developers</a> out there are saying that we can&#8217;t &#8220;require&#8221; people to upgrade, well, I disagree. He compares it to Apple not forcing you to buy a new Mac when it breaks. The difference there is that we&#8217;re not talking about hardware. We&#8217;re talking about software. Apple regularly asks you to upgrade your system to fix battery issues or other issues.</p>
<p>In the end, it&#8217;s an economic decision: I&#8217;m not going to spend valuable support <em>and</em> development time on a minority that doesn&#8217;t want to upgrade, at the cost of not developing new features or fixing bugs for current versions of WordPress. So, if you want to use our plugins, stay current!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/">Why we don&#8217;t support old WordPress versions</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/i9CzOajL6_Q" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:17;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:34:"The focus keyword in WordPress SEO";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/q8_llL3WKzY/";s:8:"comments";s:40:"http://yoast.com/focus-keyword/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:39:25 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:28:"SEOWordPressKeyword Research";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=70957";s:11:"description";s:763:"<p>This question pops up time and again: why can I only add one focus keyword to your SEO plugin? People seem to think they have to set several keywords for each post. This post explores the reasoning behind that, very deliberate, decision. This is the input field I&#8217;m talking about: The focus keyword is not&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/focus-keyword/">The focus keyword in WordPress SEO</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:30:"Array
			
			
		
			
		
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:36:"http://yoast.com/focus-keyword/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"79";}s:5:"media";a:3:{s:7:"content";s:12:"
			
			
			";s:13:"content_title";s:71:"focus keywordFocus Keyword Suggest boxFocus keyword from Google Suggest";s:19:"content_description";s:29:"The focus keyword input field";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:88:"http://yoast.com/focus-keyword/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=focus-keyword";}s:7:"summary";s:763:"<p>This question pops up time and again: why can I only add one focus keyword to your SEO plugin? People seem to think they have to set several keywords for each post. This post explores the reasoning behind that, very deliberate, decision. This is the input field I&#8217;m talking about: The focus keyword is not&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/focus-keyword/">The focus keyword in WordPress SEO</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:18;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:42:"500 Website Reviews, what we’ve learned!";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/8BRGdv5xwqA/";s:8:"comments";s:46:"http://yoast.com/500-website-reviews/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:38:12 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:41:"MagentoSEOUsability & ConversionWordPress";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=68173";s:11:"description";s:793:"<p>Over the last 3 years, we&#8217;ve sold &#38; delivered 500 website reviews, selling our 500th today. I&#8217;m incredibly proud of this and wanted to share some of our learnings in this post, as well as announce some changes. Some stats on our website reviews I started doing these website reviews in 2010, finishing 42 of&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/500-website-reviews/">500 Website Reviews, what we&#8217;ve learned!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:42:"http://yoast.com/500-website-reviews/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"66";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:75:"The Yoast Website Review team, from left to right: Michiel, Joost and Thijs";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:100:"http://yoast.com/500-website-reviews/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=500-website-reviews";}s:7:"summary";s:793:"<p>Over the last 3 years, we&#8217;ve sold &#38; delivered 500 website reviews, selling our 500th today. I&#8217;m incredibly proud of this and wanted to share some of our learnings in this post, as well as announce some changes. Some stats on our website reviews I started doing these website reviews in 2010, finishing 42 of&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/500-website-reviews/">500 Website Reviews, what we&#8217;ve learned!</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}i:19;a:15:{s:5:"title";s:50:"Change of pricing / licensing for Video SEO plugin";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/iUZTGQ5JPEc/";s:8:"comments";s:75:"http://yoast.com/change-of-pricing-licensing-for-video-seo-plugin/#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:39:47 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:9:"WordPress";s:4:"guid";s:25:"http://yoast.com/?p=64806";s:11:"description";s:819:"<p>As of last night, a license for our Video SEO plugin has become $20 cheaper for what&#8217;s probably about 90% of our customers. While doing an analysis over the holidays of what we&#8217;d sold and how much time we spent supporting people, we found that people using the plugin on multiple sites were bound to ask&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/change-of-pricing-licensing-for-video-seo-plugin/">Change of pricing / licensing for Video SEO plugin</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";s:12:"Array
			
		";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:71:"http://yoast.com/change-of-pricing-licensing-for-video-seo-plugin/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"59";}s:5:"media";a:2:{s:7:"content";s:4:"
			";s:13:"content_title";s:22:"Yoast_avatar_Thijs_def";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:158:"http://yoast.com/change-of-pricing-licensing-for-video-seo-plugin/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=change-of-pricing-licensing-for-video-seo-plugin";}s:7:"summary";s:819:"<p>As of last night, a license for our Video SEO plugin has become $20 cheaper for what&#8217;s probably about 90% of our customers. While doing an analysis over the holidays of what we&#8217;d sold and how much time we spent supporting people, we found that people using the plugin on multiple sites were bound to ask&#8230;</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/change-of-pricing-licensing-for-video-seo-plugin/">Change of pricing / licensing for Video SEO plugin</a> is a post by <a rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/joost/">Joost de Valk</a> on <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1:"A";}}s:7:"channel";a:9:{s:5:"title";s:5:"Yoast";s:4:"link";s:16:"http://yoast.com";s:11:"description";s:17:"Tweaking Websites";s:13:"lastbuilddate";s:31:"Wed, 03 Jul 2013 11:31:17 +0000";s:8:"language";s:5:"en-US";s:2:"sy";a:2:{s:12:"updateperiod";s:6:"hourly";s:15:"updatefrequency";s:1:"1";}s:9:"generator";s:29:"http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2";s:10:"feedburner";a:4:{s:14:"emailserviceid";s:11:"joostdevalk";s:18:"feedburnerhostname";s:28:"http://feedburner.google.com";s:9:"feedflare";s:158:"Subscribe with PodnovaSubscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with ODEOSubscribe with Google";s:15:"browserfriendly";s:195:"This is the combined feed for Yoast.com and the WordPress podcast. Subscribe now to get WordPress & Magento tips & tricks, helping you optimize your site for speed, search engines and conversion!";}s:7:"tagline";s:17:"Tweaking Websites";}s:9:"textinput";a:0:{}s:5:"image";a:0:{}s:9:"feed_type";s:3:"RSS";s:12:"feed_version";s:3:"2.0";s:5:"stack";a:0:{}s:9:"inchannel";b:0;s:6:"initem";b:0;s:9:"incontent";b:0;s:11:"intextinput";b:0;s:7:"inimage";b:0;s:13:"current_field";s:0:"";s:17:"current_namespace";b:0;s:19:"_CONTENT_CONSTRUCTS";a:6:{i:0;s:7:"content";i:1;s:7:"summary";i:2;s:4:"info";i:3;s:5:"title";i:4;s:7:"tagline";i:5;s:9:"copyright";}s:4:"etag";s:27:"hdwv+Ty3P0ng0tJuEBC5E/DN5yc";s:13:"last_modified";s:29:"Sun, 07 Jul 2013 21:37:37 GMT";}